Epistory – Typing Chronicles

Bought this for my 7 years old girl to practise her typing skills. Unfortunately this game is way too difficult for her and I have to take over to play. Nevertheless this is a great game.

The story is cool and puzzles are reasonable. Some fights in the game are challenging but manageable if you know what to expect. Overall the game is quite enjoyable if you have a medium level of typing skills at least.

Some of the achievements are a bit grindy. The main game takes about 7 hours to complete all contents but all achievements requires another 5-10 hours of grinding in arena. The achievement for typing 1000 letters without error is best to be completed by keep opening / closing doors in a dungeon.

Epistory is a game that successfully combines an action adventure game with RPG elements and typing! Words appear over enemies and you must type the words as fast as you can to kill the enemies before they reach you. You are also given magical abilities; lightning, fire, ice and wind each with its own unique properties, i.e fire destroys the next word, ice freezes enemies, wind pushes enemies back and lighting can destroy words on other enemies.
+ Killing enemies rewards you with experience allowing you to upgrade different magical abilities and attributes.
+ Amazing narrative that kind of hides in the background, revealed towards the end
+ Unique Art style
Conclusion:
The entire game is controlled by keyboard, I highly doubt steam controller will be viable for this game. This is a fun casual game that was a huge surprise for me. For those looking for a fun game and want to improve your typing speed, this is a great game.

This is the story of a fox and a little girl....
........... This is the beginning of your adventure. The fantastic world that unfolds before you and the story told as you progress will lead you pleasantly to the end.
The various environments of the game will reveal themselves as you progress through the story, unlocking different "points" they will appear and seem to build and fill with elements and colors.
Graphically, the game is rendered as if it were made of paper; old book pages, origami, and papier-mâché represent the world you're exploring. It's all incredibly colorful and feels like a child's imagination.
The audio creates the perfect atmosphere, with music and sounds suited to each setting; the narration is perfectly understandable and will accompany you every step of the way, telling you the story.
The gameplay is very simple: you'll have to move around to explore the various areas, and to cast your spells or perform simple actions, you'll simply have to type the words that appear. (Type game).
The puzzles are easy and will allow you to fully enjoy this game and the narrative.
Personally, I found the plot really enjoyable, and there's no shortage of twists.
I really enjoyed it!
A round of applause to the developers for making it happen.

This game is severely undercut by its lack of story telling skill. It's a visually stunning game, wildly creative, smooth, and very enjoyable to play. If I had to be specific though on the recommend I'd rate it a 3/5 with the knock really being for the delivery of the story itself, which had the opportunity to be told in a way that created a legendary game vs. just a cool one. I'm an avid writer and reader, so I fall into (I think) the target audience for this literary/bookish type game.
Combat feels fluid, love how easy it is to toggle types of magic, feels seamless to wield with the keyboard. The jarring issue is really just, the writing. I think what ended up happening is they went all in on detatched/generic/classic/myth style narration. Like a kids storybook. It's difficult to articulate but it ended up leaning way too much into cliche/canned/static/stale. Feels almost procedurally generated rather than a story you feel immersed into and that's a huge, unnecessary miss. This game falls victim to "telling", there's an expression in writing: show don't tell. At every single juncture, the extent of the story telling skill is, "She felt sad." "She felt loneliness." Stop telling us how she feels, show us. Narrate the cold feeling in her gut or her breathlessness as we pressed onward... stop making the audience do the work - YOUR job - of putting the characters feelings and experience into words FOR you!! The "she did this. she felt that" narration was extremely bland and lazy to a point of being grating, like nails on a chalkboard you want to shut it off, and it should NOT feel that way.
I realize I'm still recommending, I still think it's a unique and fun game, but hoping if the developers or anyone looking to learn from a finished product sees this, that it'll help guide future development, because this was a really unnecessary miss. If you'd demoed the game with a writing group, etc, this is something they would've been able to pick up on and offer guidance around. This game feels like it was meant to be, in part, a love letter to stories. And it fell severely, severely short on the delivery of narration. Like: "Timmy fell down. Timmy felt sad. Timmy felt lost. Timmy was always lost." vs. "His feet were a blur beneath him, and he stumbled, face down into the dirt. A pit inside him widened and a lump grew in his throat. He knew not where he was, and for a moment, he wasn't sure if he ever did." Dumb example, I know, I'm just trying to demonstrate show vs. tell, hopefully it's clear.

Just finished this game, and I will say - it's lovely, but it's not without its flaws.
Let's start with what I liked:
1. Typing gameplay!! I've never played a game where typing was a core mechanic, so it was really fun
2. The puzzles were challenging, but it was the right amount of challenging. It took a little circling (literally, in some cases) but I was able to solve them
3. The voice acting is really good!
4. The art direction is really unique and cool. The origami aesthetic was really sweet
Now for what I didn't quite like:
1. Sometimes, I'd mistype and end up frozen because I'd accidentally hit the first letter of one of the other powers - essentially leaving me open to die when facing barrages of enemies
2. Some of the words were quite difficult and I'd have to slow down. This is personal preference, obviously, and I don't fault the devs for it at all - it did expand my vocabulary :)
3. The art style completely changed for the ending cinematic. I won't say I disliked it, it was more so jarring to see.
Overall - I think it's a gorgeous game and it's got me interested in finding more games like this!

Id actually say it's a BIG MAYBE recommend. Really cute, cozy visuals with picture book, paper critters and environments. The movement isn't the best but you can eventually figure out how to maneuver. I love exploring each area but the map gets quite large as the game progresses and it wasn't very enjoyable to navigate or backtrack when i was looking for missing collectables, I think a mini map would have helped instead of only relying on the menu map. The voice acting and sound design I enjoyed a lot. The art in the ending credits was also a very nice touch to show more of the character's life.
Epistory has a lot of charm, however there is a strange difficulty curve between the relaxing exploration/puzzle solving with enemies sprinkled around and the swarm challenges, especially in early game areas. I'm not the worst typer but i didn't come into this game wanting to feel like im going to die. Some of these challenges felt so long with no half-way respawn point, really dreaded having to redo any of them if i failed. Additionally, the light colored text blends with the watercolor/pastel color palette in some areas, adding to the already hectic challenge. Allowing players to adjust enemy speed or have an invincible practice mode might've helped. Despite that, i did finish the story as it was an enjoyable enough game I didn't completely abandon it. I have no desire to do all the achievements or find all the fragments but it was a nice time. Flame was my MVP element.
Understandably, I think a skilled typist or someone who doesn't enjoy slow paced puzzles might find this game boring. Even as a puzzle enthusiast, some puzzles were pretty annoying. I didn't enjoy the ice area at all, but you can get through most puzzles with some persistence and patience. A lot of areas have mazes, which some might find tedious. A less skilled typist might rage quite, but it could be a good way to test skills. It's a unique experience and overall a decent game worth checking out if you enjoy typing and puzzles, while forgiving some issues.

This is a fun little adventure, but it probably won't make you any better at typing. The concept is inspired, if not an amalgam of disparate concepts, as you are a girl on a fox who is attacking insect nests by spelling words to proceed. The graphics and music are great, but I find the tired "narrator voice telling the story as you play" cliche kind of dull and dragged it down a bit for me, especially since there really isn't any story. Uncovering parts of the map is really well done, and the game gets progressively harder as it goes on, making it a decent enough challenge while still being very easy.
You basically spell words to manipulate obstacles and defeat enemies. You soon get four elemental abilities that vary the game play, though once you get the lightning the game gets too easy since you can chain attack multiple enemies at once and any challenge the game had ended here. There are simplistic puzzles and the exploration element is overall well done. I like the fact that you can buy upgrades and the game overall had just enough depth to keep me playing through to the end. Unfortunately, some of the achievements are terrible and I had to spend hours grinding in the arena to unlock them. Further, the arena itself is broken since people have cracked the game's code and most of the scores on there are from people using cheats.
The reason it won't make you any better at typing is because you aren't typing logical sentences but rather random words with abrupt stops. I noticed some typing errors that I made without realizing it, but the game didn't really give any guidance on correcting these mistakes. The only thing I really learned was that typing is more of a mental exercise more than anything, at least for someone who types regularly. I would get stumped up on certain words while others I could type immediately. If you're already competent at typing you will breeze through this, and if not, it probably won't make you any better. Also, the "adaptive mode" seems to not do anything other than make the game ridiculously easy if you fail over and over. Presumably, because that never happened while I played, and playing perfect didn't make the game much harder.